


Memories Of Who We Never Were

by noifsandsorbees



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, On the Run
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 01:14:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5228273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noifsandsorbees/pseuds/noifsandsorbees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Here’s the blanket Mulder wrapped around William, that he wasn’t there to buy. The bottles he never touched, the pacifiers he never cleaned. Here is the stuffed fox Monica bought him, that Scully had started calling Dad when she was too tired to think straight and William wouldn’t sleep. Here is half of her life and all of her heart and none of Mulder’s fingerprints. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memories Of Who We Never Were

She had assumed she would cry in Maggie’s arms. That her mother would hug her, squeezing her within an inch of her life, and that she would fall apart, apologizing again and again, because a postcard from a rest stop in Nevada that simply says “I’m sorry for everything” wasn’t a good enough goodbye. She doesn’t recognize the smell of her mother’s new hairspray; it’s offensive and overwhelming, and the only tears on Scully’s cheeks are from Maggie’s eyes. Scully feels like she’s hugging a stranger. She feels nothing but anger at herself for not reacting more, except even that is only a muted undertone in her head.

“It’s good to see you, Mom,” she whispers, as if it means something, as if she feels it at all. She’s become a good actor over the last two years, playing the role of wife and fiance, girlfriend and girl picked up at the bar, whatever Mulder joked to the clerk at the motel each night. She’s been Sarah Johnson and Mary Smith; Melissa Williamson on nights when she was feeling masochistic. She’s played the role of trusting lover, believing she would never be abandoned again, and of a woman free by choice from knowing what it ever felt like to be a mother. She’s been everyone but herself, even as she traces the stretchmarks on her stomach in motel mirrors and buries herself in Mulder’s arms under yet another scratchy motel blanket.

Maggie runs her fingers through Scully’s jet black hair, traces over her darkened eyebrows and avoids her vacant eyes. “I’m so glad you’re home Dana,” she whispers before hugging her again. There are so many things she must re-learn, Scully realizes as she hugs her mother back, and the strangeness of her first name, so proper and feminine, will be among the most difficult. This is the first time she’s heard it aloud in two years.

Maggie leads her daughter to the kitchen table, pushing a mug of tea into her hands, because tea is supposed to soothe. It tastes bitter, and Scully can’t swallow more than a sip.

“Yours and Fox’s stuff is in the basement. We couldn’t get all of your furniture to fit, but John, Walter and Monica helped me move as much as we could.”

“Thank you,” Scully whispers, and this is genuine. This is guilt and self resentment. This is the understanding that the world was bending to accommodate them as they ran to its edges and hid.

She stands on feet that don’t feel like her own and walks downstairs, needing to avoid Maggie’s heartbroken eyes, begging for answers. In the basement are the parts of her past that won’t ask her why, but might just make her feel home.

There are boxes piled to the ceiling, labeled in thick marker with words that once described her home. “Kitchen: fragile, sheets, winter clothes, Fox’s books, Dana’s movies, William’s room.” She finds herself drawn to the last one and opens it, desperate to hold her child in her arms again.

Here’s the blanket Mulder wrapped around William, that he wasn’t there to buy. The bottles he never touched, the pacifiers he never cleaned. Here is the stuffed fox Monica bought him, that Scully had started calling Dad when she was too tired to think straight and William wouldn’t sleep. Here is half of her life and all of her heart and none of Mulder’s fingerprints.

She loves him desperately, but she will never shake her sudden possessiveness over the child that he never claimed as his with anything more than words. He had resented her for giving him away, and she would have told him he didn’t have the right, if only they ever actually talked about this.

She wonders if he ever would have come home. If he would have walked in when William was at the kitchen table one night, practicing addition with a pencil too big for his hands, laid down his bag and curled into Scully’s arms. She wonders if she would have welcomed him, if William ever would have warmed up to this stranger. If maybe a glass would have broken across the room with a child’s single thought, as someone swooped into their lives without invitation.

She wonders if she ever would have changed her son’s last name to Mulder. She can’t tell if the world needs another William Scully or another William Mulder more. Sometimes she thinks it’s both, though usually she thinks it’s neither.

Scully closes the box and hides it in a corner of the room, burying it away from her family’s eyes. Mulder will come tomorrow, start picking through his old life to see what still matters, but, for right now, this one doesn’t belong to him.


End file.
